Exaile is a pretty decent music player for GNOME written in PyGTK which comes with features like tabbed playlists, lyrics fetching, radio support, file browser, support for dynamic and smart playlists, cover support, 10-band equalizer and more. The latest version was released a few days ago and comes with several bug fixes and minor issue fixes.

Exaile 0.3.2.1 running in Debian Squeeze

This article is divided into three parts:

Exaile Overview & Screenshots

How to Install Exaile in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

How to Install Exaile in Debian 6.0 Squeeze

Overview & Screenshots

Exaile has been around for quite some time and it continued to improve over the years, keeping in the same time a clean, tidy interface with the sidebar to the left, for fast access to the file browser, playlists or music collection, and the playlist space occupying the rest of the window. A nice feature is the support for tabbed playlists, which allows quick access to several different ones. Let me list some of the notable features which come with Exaile 0.3.2.1:

music collection support

support for tabbed playlists

dynamic and smart playlists

devices support

covers fetching

lyrics fetching

Internet radio support

file browser

sortable playlists by many factors (see the View->Columns menu)

10-band equalizer

track queue

on-screen display (OSD)

ReplayGain

crossfading

tray icon integration

tag editor

ratings system

large number of bundled plugins

Adding files to the music collection

Equalizer, cover manager, collection manager and tabbed playlists

File browser and queue manager

How to Install Exaile in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

You can install the latest Exaile using the Launchpad PPA. In Maverick, open a terminal and issue the following commands:

That’s it. Run Exaile by pressing Alt+F2 and typing exaile in the run box that appears.

How to Install Exaile in Debian 6.0 Squeeze

By default, Debian Squeeze comes with version 0.2.14, so in order to Install the latest release you have two options. Either download the tarball from here (direct link here), uncompress it and then issue the make && make install command or just run the binary executable found in the archive.

2. Download the source tarball
Grab the source tarball from here (direct link here) then open a terminal, make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the tarball, and extract it:

tar -xzf exaile-0.3.2.1.tar.gz

3. Install Exaile
Change the working directory to exaile-0.3.2.1 and issue the following commands:

make
make install

The last one as root. This should be all, run Exaile by typing exaile in a console or pressing Alt+F2 and typing exaile in the run box.

Exaile also has support for DAAP, both client and server. I have had problems with Exaile crashing when working with remote daap shares in Maverick but not in Lucid. For now I have been using the ppa version from Lucid with Maverick AND have even installed it on my debian box, since the debian version as the same issues.